22 February 2008

February 22nd is known by Americans, and anyone who bought their calendar in the United States, as the birthday of the first U.S. President, George Washington. But 27 years earlier, a pioneer in taxonomy and the study of fishes was born.

Like many of the earliest taxonomists, Artedi originally intended to join the clergy. The patience that had to have been necessary for a taxonomist of this period, classifying the world essentially from scratch, seems to have attracted a particular sort. Another of this same ilk was Artedi's friend, the much better known Carolus Linnaeus. Linnaeus and Artedi worked together at Uppsala University, and became so close that they each signed wills leaving their work, notes and books to each other in the event of their death.

Artedi's part of this contract came due far too soon. At only the age of 30, with a long life and career ahead of him, he drowned in Amsterdam. The father of ichthyology, the man who had begun the real process of grouping and organizing the fishes, was still as much a stranger to the water as any of us. Even at this young age, he left the world two classics in the field, the Bibliotheca Ichthyologica and Philosophia Ichthyologica, which were only manuscripts at the time of his death. Linnaeus, still his devoted friend, made sure they were published and got their proper attention.

19 February 2008

First of all, I'd like to apologize for the long delay in getting back to this blog. It's been a very busy month, and I promise to be more consistent.

Now that the International Space Station is up and running, and Mir is no longer in the news (not to mention the skies), it's easy to forget its importance. Mir was no less than mankind's first long-term step into space, the first time that our voyages beyond our planet became more than just voyages. It was the first place that we as humans truly lived in space.

For just short of ten years, Mir orbited the Earth. That is still the record for longest continuous human habitation in space. It was host to 39 visiting spacecraft, including nine visits by the American space shuttle, and another benchmark of its place in history were these nine times when the old Cold War enemies met in the vacuum of space, not just peacefully, but cooperatively and for mutual benefit. Citizens of twelve nations were at one time or another aboard the station, making it the first international space station, before that name was taken officially.

Mir came down in 2001, the victim not of a failure of engineering, like the U.S. spy satellite on its way to Earth as I write this, but a lack of funding. I for one was sad to see the pictures of its burning end in the sky about the South Pacific. It was like seeing the Spirit of St. Louis destroyed, or Magellan's ship. I will always stand by my idea that Mir was one of the best things humanity ever made, and no matter how many generations of space station come after, no matter how advanced or commonplace they become, this will always be the station that started our life beyond Earth.